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Posts by SHARK
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2019-03-13 at 5:31 PM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
Originally posted by hydromorphone You know, it just hit me that Malice REALLY is gone… like… I knew he was gone. I knew it in my heart of hearts he went through with it… like, I felt a disturbance in the force or some shit, but to KNOW, without that sliver of doubt being there, that little "maybe I'm wrong… I don't think I am, but I hope so…" really hits hard.
I was in a nursing home, not having access to WiFi for what seemed an eternity when BPHR read to me Malice's post. I immediately began crying. I nearly lost it… I knew then there was nothing I could do but I so desperately wanted to.
I don't know now that I want to "save" Malice, but I just wish I could have helped his suffering… I guess because I suffer so similarly… I wish someone would save me or just put me out of my misery.
I've learned one thing, love is really the only thing that matters. When it boils down, that's all we really want. I think that's what Malice wanted, but was too afraid to find. Hell, even for me, intimacy is a scary thing. I don't blame him. Honestly, if I had any sense, I should be just as frightened of it as he was. It hurts. It scars like no other.
I miss Malice a lot. I miss talking to him, asking him advice… the guy helped me A LOT, and I really appreciate the time he took. I wish I could have helped he 1/10th as much as he helped me even…
I've just said fuck it all
Didn't read -
2019-03-13 at 4:09 PM UTC in Sanctionedsuicide foumsIt would be hilarious to direct suicidal people here.
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2019-03-13 at 4:02 PM UTC in Theists of NIS, why do you believe?
Originally posted by mmQ I like that. The HARD problem (like I fucking know what I'm talking about I only use one or two syllable words) is where did stupid "GOD" come from? I hate the concept of eternity. I hate it. The BEGINNING. there never was one? Name a beginning point and then tell me what happened BEFORE that.
I like to imagine that the universe is some kind of grand, beautiful monadic godlike existence that is self sufficient in a way that is neither eternal nor finite, some type of causal loop of definite size but no start or end point. -
2019-03-13 at 3:58 PM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro EditionYou know if you smoke enough marijuana you can go 2 the moon
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2019-03-13 at 3:53 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-13 at 3:51 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Lanny I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with epiphenomenalism but honestly it's never really bothered me, and I think once you get over it being really different than how we usually think about things it's really a pretty satisfying explanation, or at least framework for explanation, of consciousness.
My personal dissatisfaction comes from the fact that my mouth can obviously talk about things like the ineffable nature of the colour blue, and how hard it is for me to describe it to a blind man.
It is difficult for me to imagine why my mouth would be talking about something like the "shape" of a ball if my integrated visual experience was not part of the process. And if it is, I don't find a good reason to separate it from its syntactical function for any good reason.
I like to think about it by analogy to a calculator. Certainly I can generate report without consciousness, like I can generate the number 40 on a screen without ever doing any actual calculation of the number. In theory it could just contain a massive list of "if/then" statements that match an input question to fetch a precalculated output. For example "if input 2+2 then print 4" but for all possible combinations of calculations I might reasonably try.
What convinces me calculation is actually happening is that we can understand reductively what's taking place and principally break down WHY the calculator generates the output in the general case. The explanation is completely syntactical at its most basic level, but the calculative idea is an abstraction of that.
In the case of consciousness, there is decent evidence that our conscious perception does play some causal role our behaviour, even if we don't know HOW (and I am not saying this means evidence of conscious libertarian free will or anything, but that conscious perception feeds forward into behaviour).
For example, ever catch a ball? Go out with a friend and have them freely toss the ball to you from far away, do it a couple of times and try to observe the contents of your mind as it happens. Now, as an unstructured informational procedure this shit is difficult as fuck to automate. But as it turns out, the "optimization" that the human brain developed to perform this function is to move the object into the middle of the visual field, then use proprioception to move your hand relative to your head and catch it. I think in that case, you're very consciously aware of what's about to happen as the ball moves in on you, and you adjust to catch it.
You can still argue that an integrated information structure that is analogous to a visual field can exist and be used to process data without consciousness (in theory), but I think empirically that is not the case for the brain.
As an example, you can look into the "phi illusion". One version of this illusion uses only two lights, separated by some distance. At the beginning, one is lit and the other is off. The first goes off, then the second goes on.
However those subjected to this version of the illusion will report seeing the light move between the first to the second, even though there is no intermediate light, it is just an on/off.
Now of course no intermediate light exists. The illusion of movement exists purely in their consciousness, and it is mistakenly reported from the subjects' consciousness.
Now it is possible that the report is still just generated by completely unconscious processes, and consciousness of the experience is just a coincidental epiphenomenon. But I find that hard to believe because... Then why is the machine behaving like it is?
So let's imagine we prick Lanny and Zombie Lanny with a pin in our universe and the proposed zombie universe. Both say "Ouch!" and I say "you baby, that didn't hurt!" Zlanny snaps back "Fuck you, it did!". Remember, these universes are physically identical so Zlanny surely reports for the same physical reasons as you, and surely he must be speaking with the same conviction as you... You're convinced you're having a qualitative experience but Zlanny would be convinced of the same. So... if it's just some syntactical state that produces the seeming of conscious pain, then how do you know YOU'RE not a Zombie now?
And if that's the case, what does the additional element actually do for you that it doesn't do for the Zombie? Not "what function could it serve?" I mean literally, WHAT are we talking about at that point? What is left over in your case?
The problem simply vanishes if you remove the proposed additional element. In reverse, I think the problem is "generated" by entertaining the additional element. So just don't add any new ingredients.
I do have some sympathy towards property dualism though, and I think information as a concept sets up to derive consciousness as something that reducible arises from known physics. But I still think the properties of information structures are firmly physical in nature.I don't see why consciousness superveneing on physical facts makes it "subsumed by the physical". Like I have a certain MP3 file in my library. There's a copy on my laptop's SSD and on a backup spinning platter drive. We'd quite naturally say these are the same file, they consist of the same byte sequence. Yet that byte sequences in one case supervenes on distribution of magnetic charge over a chunk of spinning metal and on the presence of electrical charge in the other. I wouldn't call the byte sequence "subsumed by the magnetic" in one case and "subsumed by the electrical" in the other. The byte sequence isn't magnetic or electrical, it's abstract, even if it "emerges" (be it by our design) from different physical phenomena.
It's subsumed by the physical in the sense that if we can push it around and get reports of it, we can investigate it as a physical phenomenon.
I think what you are talking about is the software/hardware distinction, and it applies to the mind/brain distinction very well. The hardware involved is some variable syntactical machinery and the software is the input information that can configure it a particular way.
The information stored on a CD vs on a vinyl for example is subsumed by the physical because the point is to generate the same syntactical result. The end goal is how to vibrate your auditory sensors in a particular way, and we can find different ways to accomplish that.
The song isn't actually on the disc nor in the player, both are simply precursors that must be combined to generate that particular information structure to be interpreted by you.
The way I view it is, it is very similar to considering the more abstract ideas of a computer.
For example I can syntactically explain how your PC does everything it while running a Java program without ever referencing Java Virtual Machine, and in theory I could produce all the functionality of JVM from pure random chance too. And conversely if I had no idea wtf was going on from the other perspective and I went in to reverse engineer the PC from the hardware and physics, it would seem indecipherable and I'd have no idea wtf was going on above the syntactical level.
DD's black boxes thought experiment is a great way to think about related concepts.
http://cogprints.org/247/1/twoblack.htmThat would seem to be good evidence that the physical facts give rise to experience, but I don't see why it necessitates consciousness having causative power. It seems to demonstrate that the physical has causative power (the physical composition of a fruit affects the experience of consuming it) but not that our conscious experience has any effect on our behavior.
I think there is decent evidence that conscious events are active physical events, and I find it plausible that they are defined by their physical causal properties, which would be what structures the content of our consciousness. If that is indeed the case, then I think it plays a causal role by being "what your body responds to", essentially.
My current view lines up with most simulationists like Marvin Minsky: that consciousness is essentially the process that crunches the raw data and makes it more workable, the "user illusion", the desktop to your brain so it is actually usable, as opposed to using punch cards on a beige box with no monitor. There is a structure in the brain known as the "claustrum", which seems to be responsible for information integration. I think that, alongside the phi illusion, tells us something about how our brains must process data: consciousness is "assembled" unconsciously as a means to process the external world. So I think it's reasonable to assume that it feeds forward for your body to actually respond to it rather than just being an internal lightshow that you sort of "are".Sure, I'm not proposing that brains just random chemical vats that happen to give rise to coherent behavior that looks like a conscious agent is controlling it. It seems quite clear that the brain does a great deal of information processing in interpreting and producing speech. The reason I say one date and not some other when someone asks me my birthday is because of complex information processing in the brain and if you want to take "consciousness" to mean "information processing" then sure, there are no p-zombies, can't reasonably explain p-zombies without information processing. But I don't think that explains why I have a subjective experience of someone asking me a question. Databases can answer that question, do the requisite information processing, all the time without having an experience of doing so. Nor am I saying that when someone asks me a question it's just a coincidence that I have an experience that seems to correspond to that, obviously my experience corresponds to physical reality in some way. I just think that the experience of being asked a question and responding, and behavior and physical changes involved in it are different things. Even if they have the same cause and always happen together in this particular world, I have no problem imagining systems without consciousness answering the same question (this happens all the time, as with the database) or having the experience without the corresponding physical having undergoing the same changes.
Think about conscious states in similar terms to software: I can generate a given text file using any computing hardware and word processing software, and open it on pretty much any hardware and software. And you can generate the text output without the file.
But of course my text file is in fact a real thing, and it is fundamentally physical in nature. It is even principally possible to determine the ontic fact about whether or not it exists and it is there. But there are just an absurd level of abstraction layers between it and the physics involved so it's ridiculously difficult, but in principle, all information about my text file is reducible to physics. -
2019-03-13 at 9:09 AM UTC in Theists of NIS, why do you believe?
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2019-03-13 at 9:01 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Obbe Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with terms that are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.
Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes. The most prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual. We ‘see’ solutions to problems, the best of which may be ‘brilliant’, and the person ‘brighter’ and ’clearheaded’ as opposed to 'dull', 'fuzzy-minded', or 'obscure' solutions. These words are all metaphors and the mind-space to which they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it we can 'approach' a problem, perhaps from some 'viewpoint', and 'grapple' with its difficulties, or seize together or 'com-prehend' parts of a problem, and so on, using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind-space.
The adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space are analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mindspace when we speak of our minds as being 'quick,' 'slow', 'agitated' (as when we cogitate or co-agitate), 'nimble-witted', 'strong-' or 'weak-minded.' The mind-space in which these metaphorical activities go on has its own group of adjectives; we can be 'broad-minded', 'deep', 'open', or 'narrow-minded'; we can be 'occupied'; we can 'get something off our minds', 'put something out of mind', or we can 'get it', let something 'penetrate', or 'bear', 'have', 'keep', or 'hold' it in mind.
As with a real space, something can be at the 'back' of our mind, in its 'inner recesses', or 'beyond' our mind, or 'out' of our mind. In argument we try to 'get things through' to someone, to 'reach' their 'understanding' or find a 'common ground', or 'point out', etc., all actions in real space taken over analogically into the space of the mind.
You are literally just babbling past me, which is what you always do. The problem is still simply, why are thoughts "had" by a system, rather than feeding forward informationally. Whether this is a metaphor or analogy or a dildo up my ass is still not even beginning to describe the problem. -
2019-03-13 at 2:57 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Lanny I suppose it depends on if you consider laws involving physical things to be themselves part of the physical facts about the world. That sounds pedantic but it's kind of important, if physical facts can give rise to non-physical phenomena, and the laws governing this interaction are not part of the physical facts, then it's perfectly conceivable that the physical facts of the world can remain unaltered while the non-physical facts which supervene on them are different.
I think the main problem (and Descartes faced this too) is that if a physical fact can affect it, then it is subsumed by the physical.
Even if it is only a one way street (which I don't agree with) and an epiphenomenon, that fact that it is one way in one particular configuration and another way in another configuration means there is at least some reason that gives it structure one way rather than the other.
Now you can argue that this merely establishes a correlation, and you can conceive of another universe where the physical facts are the same but whatever non physical facts are different. But I would argue that there is some kind of necessary, principally reducible relationship (and consciousness has some direct causal power) precisely because there seems to be non-arbitrary structure to it: the experience of eating an apple differs from the experience of eating a pear in ways that I could confirm by differences in what I know about them, and you can report kt. I think that the more conservative explanation is simply that consciousness is just some set of conditions in an information space. There can be information systems structured and integrated in such a way that a change in some element of that system will affect the overall state of the system, and "consciousness" is simply what it means to access and work with any element of the integrated system. It is simply a property of the model in that case. And if it's integrated in the right ways, they can pretty much start to "think" as a result of the previous integrated state of the structure.I think there needs to be something extra because empirical investigation seems to at least be theoretically capable of explaining of explaining all of my physical behaviors without reference to consciousness. Nervous signals, information processing, muscle actuation, all physical phenomena that don't need to make reference to consciousness to explain. Despite a legacy of substance dualism and a society that assumes, almost by necessity, that our conscious experience has some kind of executive role in our behavior we have no evidence that this is the case, and some reasonable evidence to the contrary. The physical world doesn't actually seem to give us any evidence that consciousness exists at all, there are biological machines walking around and we can explain their behavior but it's only by analogy to our own experience and form that we attribute experience to other physical systems, no where in nature have we empirically discovered consciousness.
And yet I have immediate and intensely compelling evidence that I am in fact conscious, far better evidence than the physical sciences have ever given me for anything. And I can't even imagine why the empirical sciences could do to produce evidence of consciousness, what would it look like?
Given I have good reason to believe consciousness exists, but no evidence that it has any physical effect on the world, nor any physical evidence that even exists, it seems quite reasonable to put it into some non-physical category.
I think the problem is that you're thinking of two different levels of explanation as one.
I agree that you don't need consciousness to, in principle, explain the reports of a conscious person in a syntactical capacity.
And in theory in some branch of the quantum wave function, we could end up in a universe where monkeys banging on a typewriter output answers constantly as a matter of pure chance that completely pass the Turing test, but of course there is no consciousness going on.
But I think you would need consciousness to explain the intermediate steps in a complete way that has total predictive power over the behaviour of systems that are structured a certain way. For example if the content of consciousness is indeed an integrated information structure, then why is it crunched a particular way? I think the generalised answer will be precisely the nature of consciousness itself. And this, again, I think will be some very abstract internally referential, integrated information scheme that will have a particular set of properties that ARE what consciousness "is", what it means to be conscious. But again, I don't think you can just meaningfully digest it by analogy, and you will need to understand it's full syntactical workings to sort of start understanding its full workings.
I suspect that in principle we could find some abstract syntactical, coincidentally structured garbage as the explanation to our consciousness, and a lot of "meaning" will only be locatable by trying to understand culture and other environmental influences as they relate to us. Even these will ultimately become very abstract because they're so complexly linked to us over so many generations that there is no real unified first person comprehending "meaning" to you, as a person. It's not that you just don't get it, it's literally not going to be the right format file for meaningfulness in your consciousness, it's like trying to use VLC to open the VLC exe.
A good example is colour. People often point to the explanatory gap on explaining something like "what blue is" to a blind man while establishing the domain of subjective experience.
But even colour perception is quite demonstrably just some abstract representational phenomenon taking place within your consciousness VM. There is no reason to believe that colour is actually some magically ineffable qualia that exists of itself, but rather that it is so complexly related to our brains as an idea that again, it just makes no sense in any way except the syntactical sense, because our mind isn't meant to actually run the steps, it runs ON those steps. -
2019-03-13 at 1:26 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Obbe In being conscious of consciousness we feel we feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, memories, thought and attention. We feel that consciousness is the basis of concepts, learning, reasoning. We feel that consciousness must be located within our heads. All of these statements are actually false.
Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, as we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of - sort of like asking a flashlight in a dark room to find something that doesn't have any light shining upon it. Everywhere it looks there appears to be light, when in reality most of the room is in darkness.
We feel that consciousness is continuous. But if you think of a minute as being 60000 milliseconds, are you conscious for every one of those milliseconds? We are conscious less often then we believe we are, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.
Consciousness is often unnecessary. Consciousness is not necessary for concepts.
Consciousness is not necessary for learning. Consciousness is not necessary for thinking, nor for reasoning. Consciousness is not a copy of experience. Consciousness has no location. I may elaborate on these statements more later on, but if you are actually interested in learning more about this theory of consciousness, read The Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes.
Idk what loony toons definition of consciousness you are (or whoever you stole this from is) using but none of those are necessary assumptions for consciousness, and a couple of baseless claims are made. For example if some part of visual consciousness is indeed an integrated information structure, the "why" of it being conscious (even though you don't "need" it to produce report etc) is simply a matter of "how" it comes to be effective in how our body further processes our visual perception. What makes this not so simple is that how that actually works is ludicrously complex.
I definitely don't think IIT is a complete or final theory at all but it addresses an obviously important element of consciousness, which is information integration, something which is very important account for in the process of giving an account of the appearance of a "subjective experience". -
2019-03-13 at 1:10 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks It's hard to take a firm position either way on the matter, because we have no instruments that can "detect/measure" subjective experience.
Listen dipshit, you have been babbling this the entire time and it is just making you look like a retard.
We already accept report to be a sign of consciousness in living beings. The very fact that you're talking about consciousness at all by making air waves through your mouth and a pattern of ATP discharges that actuate your keyboard means we have a genuine measuring instrument available. The entire point of this discussion at large is to figure out what aspect of that instrument leads to consciousness. We already have a for-sure "maximal" neural correlate of consciousness, it is the brain et al.
The way to test for consciousness is to take an approach similar to Integrated Information Theory, which tries to find what type of physical structures could support the phenomenological properties of consciousness, then proposes to test minimal neural correlates of consciousness (MNCCs) against the phenomenology.
One, in this framework you would test for a value called Phi to test for integration and "how conscious" a system is due to the level of integration. This is basically a test of how many interconnections each informational unit in a system is subject to. The conscious state is essentially just this state in any given instant.
Two, you can test it by using the accepted report hardware, the brain. This is actually a current area of neuroscience research. You can simply stimulate a particular set of neural structures and generate a conscious experience, then record report from the subject.
In fact we understand consciousness so well as an idea that researchers, a priori and from current neuroscience research and knowledge, and known principles were able to create a brand now optical illusion, never before practically or empirically observed until it was tested, and replicated.
That's how much predictive purchase we have over the concept already. I thought you were a psych major or some shit? Do you actually read any consciousness research literature or just jerk off to the conversation like anime nerds who have fantasy battles? -
2019-03-13 at 12:45 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by mmQ I've often considered an experiment of having a child and keeping it in a pitch black room for however many years with no sound or any interaction whatsoever other than feeding and watering it, and then introducing into 'the real world' and seeing what it does.
They would be several mentally retarded. This "experiment" has been tried before under similar conditions, but less extreme. More extreme would just lead to more retarded children. Genetically, we are geared to be learning machines based on cultural transmission. No culture and you're basically left with a sub ape level creature, because even apes need nurturing. -
2019-03-13 at 12:43 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
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2019-03-12 at 8:28 PM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
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2019-03-12 at 8:27 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of ConsciousnessThe problem isn't pushing around the symbols, it is creating subjective perception to make them mean something... Information integration is almost certainly a part of it (why do you have any sort of structured visual perception rather than processing in a feed forward manner?) And certainly other animals that we consider most likely to be conscious have direct analogy to most of our neural equipment except our language centers. It would be quite a stretch to propose that most animals are not conscious for example, a Cartesian view.
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2019-03-12 at 7:47 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Obbe I would imagine so. Given the potential for super-human processing power, I imagine that once AI begins to create it's own language and own "social world", more complex than any human culture is capable of, these AI's would have much more consciousness then we can possibly imagine.
Why would consciousness have anything to do with developing a language? Do you think a human brain that never learns a language is unconscious? -
2019-03-12 at 7:45 PM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
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2019-03-12 at 5:31 PM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro EditionNigaa
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2019-03-12 at 12:02 PM UTC in Go back to 4:3 laptops
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2019-03-12 at 2:50 AM UTC in Go back to 4:3 laptops3:2 would be even better but so don't want a Chromebook or MacBook gay
